. 304 MODERM~TYAND ITS ~ R E S
To some extent, what is being debated is the tension between the
'global' and the 'local% the transformation of identities. National
identities, as we have seen, represent attachment to particular places,
events, symbols, histories. They represent what is sometimes called a
pmticnlaristic form of attachment or belonging. There has always been a
tension between these and more universalistic idenflcations-for
example,to 'humanityj rather than to 'Englishness'. TMs tension has
persisted throughout rnodeniity: the growth of nation-states, national
economies and national culturescontinuing to provide a focus for the
fist; the expansion of the world market and modernity as a global
. systemproviding the focus far the second. With Section 5,which
examines how globdization in its most recent forms impacts on
identities, you may h d it heIpful to thinkof suchimpact in terms of
new ways of aaiculating the particularistic and the universalistic
aspects of identity, or new ways of negotiatingthe tension between the
twa,
5 THE GLOBAL, THE LOCAL AND THE
RETURN OF ETHNICITY
Are national identities being %homogenized'?Cultural homogenization is
the w i s h e d cry of those who are convincedthat globalization
threatens te undernine national identities and the 'unity'of nationaI
cultures.However, as a view of the future of identities in a post-modm
world this picture is too simplistic, exaggerated and one-sided as it
stands.
We can pick up at least t h e major qualificationsor counter-tendencies;
The fist arises horn Kevin Robins's argument and the observation that,
alongside the tendency towards global homogenization,there is also a
fascination with differenceand the marketing of ethnicity and
'otherness'. mere is a new interest in 'the local' together with the
impact of 'the global'. Globalization [inthe form of flexible
specialization and 'niche' marketing) actually exploits local
differentiation. Thus, instead of thinking of the global replacingthe
Iocd, it would be more accutate to think of a new articulation between
"e global' and 'the local'. This 'local' is not, of course, to be confused
with older identities, W l y rooted in well-bounded localities, Rather, it
operates within the logic of globalization, However, it seems unlikely
that globalization will simply destroy national identities. It ,ismare
likely to produce, simultaneously, new "global' and new 'local'
identifications.
The second qualification to the argument about the global
homogenization of identities is that globalizationis very unevenly
distributed around the globe, between regions and between different
strata of the papulation within regions.This is what Doreen Massey
calls globalization's 'power geometry'.,
CHAPTER 6 THEQUESTIONOF CULTURRL IDENTW 305
ACTIVITY 2 You should now read Reading E,'A global sense of place',by Doreen
Massey. Note her examples of the ways in which the same processes
affect groups and places difle~ntly.
The third point in the critique of cultural homogenization is the
question of who is most affected by it. Since there is an uneven
direction to the flow, and since unequal relations of d t u r a l power
between 'the West' and "the Rest' persist, globalization -thoughby
definition something which affects the whole globe -may appear to be
essentially a Western phenomenon.
Kevin Robins reminds us:
For all that it has projected itseK as transhistoricaland
transnational, as the banscendent and universalizingforce of
modernization and modernity, global capitalism bas in reality been
about westernization-the export of western commodities, values,
priorities, ways of life. Ina process of unequal cultural encounter,
'fereigd populations have been compelled to be the subjects and
subalterns of western empire, while, no less significantly,the west
has come face to face with the 'alien' and 'exotic' culture of its
'Other'.Globalization, as it dissolves the barriers of distance,
makes the encounter of colonial centre and colonized periphery
immediate and intense.
[Robins, 1991,p.25)
hthelatest form of globalization, it is stiIl the images, artefacts and
identities of Western modernity, produced by the cultural indusbies of
'Western' societies [includingJapan)which dominate theglobal
networks. The proliferation of identity cheices is more extensive at the
'centre' of the global system than at its peripheries. The patterns of
unequal cultural exchange, familiar from earlier phases of globalization,
persist into late-modernity.If you want to sample the exotic cuisines of
other cultures in one place, it would be better to eat in Manhattan, Paris
or London than in Calcutta or Delhi.
On the other hand, societies of the periphery have alwaysbeen open to
Western cultural influences and are now more so. The idea that these
are 'closed' places -ethnically pure, culturally baditional, undisturbed
until yesterday by the ruptures of modernity -is a Western fantasy
about 'otherness': a 'colonial fantasy' maintained about the periphery by
the West, which tends to like its natives 'pure' and its exotic places
'untouched'. Nevertheless,the evidence suggests that globalization is
impacting everywhere, including the West, and the "periphery'is
experiencing i t s pluralizing impact too, though at a slower, more
uneven pace.
306 MODERNllYAND ITSF W R E S
-
The global post-modern
5.1 'TMEREST'IN'THEWEST' -
The preceding pages have presented t h e e qualifications to the fist of
the,tbes possible consequences of globalization: i.e,the
homogenization of global identities. These are that:
{a] Globalization can go hand hhand with a s~engtheningof 1ocaI
identities, thoughthis is still within the logic of he-space
compression;,
(b] GIobalization is an uneven process and has ih own 'power
geomeby';
(c) Globalization retains some aspects of Western globd domination,
but cultural identities everywhere are being relativized by the
impact of time-space compression.
Perhaps the most striking example of this &d point is the
phenornenbn of migration. After World War ZI, the decelonizing
European powers thought they could pull out of their colonial spheres
of Muence, leaving the consequences of imperialism behind them. But
global interdependencenow works both ways. The movements of
Western styles, images,cokodities and consumer identities outwards
has been matched by a momentous mbvement of peoples h r n the
peripheries to the centre in one of the largest and most sustained
periods of 'unplanned' migration in recent history*Driven by poverty,
drought, famine, economic undevehpment and crop failure, civil war
and political unrest, regional conflict and arbitrary changes of political
regime, the accumulating foreignindebtedness of their governments to
Western banks,very large numbers of the poorer peoples of the globe
have taken the 'message' of global consumerism at face value, and
moved towards the places where 'the goodies' come from and where the
CHAPTER 6 THE QUESTIONOF CULTURAL 1DENYWf 307
chances of survival are higher. In the era of global communications, the
West is'only a one-way airline charter ticket away.
There have been continuous, large-scale,legal 'md'illegal' migrations
into the US fiom many poor counbies of Latin America, and the
. ~ Caribbean basin (Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the
islands of the British Caribbean),as well as substantialnumbersof
kcconomic migrants' and political refugees from South-East Asia and the
Far East -Chinese, Koreans, Viebamese, Cambodians,Indians,
Pakistanis,Japanese. Canada has a substantialminority Caribbean
population. One consequence is a dramatic shift inthe 'ethnic mix' of
the US population -the fist since the mass migrations of the early part
of this century. In 1980,one inevery five Americans came from an
African-American,Asian-American or American-Indian background. h
. 1990,the figure was one in four: In many major cities (incIudmg Los
Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Miami], whites are
now a minority. Inthe 1980~~the population of Cdifoda grewby 5.6
million, 43 per cent of which were people of colour -that is, including
Hispanics and Asians, as well as African-Americans [compared to 33
per cent in 19803-and one-fifth is foreign born. By 1995 one-thirdof
American public school students are expected to be 'non-white' (US
Census, 1991,quoted inPlatt, 1991).
Over the same period, there has been a parallel 'migration' into Europe
of Arabs from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia], and Africans
&om Senegal and Zaire into France and Belgium; of Turks and North
Africans into Germany;of Asians &omthe ex-Dutch East and West
Indies and Surinam into the Netherlands; of No& Africans into Italy;
and, of course, of people from the Caribbean and from India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda and Sri Lanka into the UK. There are
political refugees from SomaIia, Ethiopia, the Sudan and Sri Lanke and
other places in small numbers everytirhere.-
This formation of ethnic-minority %enclaves'within the nation-states of
the West has led to a 'pluralization' of national cultures and national
identities.
5.2 THE DIALECTIC OF IDENTITIES
How has this situation played itself out in Britain interms of identity?
The fist effect has been to contest the settled contours of national
identity, and to expose its closures to the pressures of difference,
'otherness' and cuItural diversi-~y,This is happening, to different
degrees, inall the Western national cultures and a i a consequence it has
brought the whale issue of national identity and thecultural
'cenlredness' of the West into the open.
Older certainties and hierarchies of British identity he
called into question in a world of dissolving boundaries and
disrupted continuities. Ina countq-that it is now a container of
308 MOI)EFIMllT AND ITS FUTURES
-
African and Asian cultures,the sense of what it is to be British can
never again have the old confidence and surety. Other sources of
identity are no less fiagile. What does it mean to be European in a
continent coloured not only by the cultures of its former colonies,
but also by American and now Japanese cultures? Is not the very
category of identity itsalf problematical? Is it at all possible, in
global times, to regain a coherent and integral sense of identity?
Continuity and historicity of identity are challengedby the
immediacy and intensity of global cultural confrontations. The
comforts of Tradition are fundamentally challenged by the
imperativeto forge a new self-interpretationbased upon the
responsibilities of cultural Trans1ation,
(Robins,1991, p.41)
Another effect has been to trigger a widening of the field of identities,
and a proIiferation of new ideniity-positions together with a degree of
poIarization amongst and between them. These developments constitute
the second and third possible consequences of globalization I referred to
earlier [Section 4) -the possibility that globalization might lead to a
strengthening of local identities, or to the production of new identities.
The strengbning of local identities can be seen in the shang defensive
reaction of those members of dominant ethnic groups who feel
threatened by the presence of other cultures. In the UK, fox example,
such defensivenesshas produced a revamped Englishness, an aggressive
little Englandism, and a retreat to ethnic absolutism in an attempt to
shore up the nation and rebuild 'anidentity that coheres, is unified and
filters out threats in social experience' (Sennett, 1971,p.15). This is
often grounded in what I have earlier called 'culturd racism', and is
evident now in legitimate political, parties of both Left and Right, and in
more exhemist political movements throughout Westem Europe.
It is sometimes matched by a strategic retreat to more defensive
identitiesamongst the minority cammunities themselves in response to .
the experience of culturalracism and exclusion. Such sbategies include
re-identification with cultures of origin (inthe Caribbean,India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan); the construction of strong counter-ethnicities -
as in the symbolic identification of second-generation Afro-Caribbean
youth, through the symbols and motifs of Rastafarianism,with their
African origin and heritage; or the revival of cdturkil ~aditionalism.
religious orthedoxy and political separatism, for example, amongst
,somesections of the Muslim community.
There is also some evidence of the third possible consequences of
globalization -the production of new identities. A good example is
those new identities which have emerged in the 1970s,grouped around
the s i d e r 'black', which in the British context provides a new focus
of identification for both fro-Caribbean and Asian communities. What
these communities have in common, which they represent through
taking on the "lack' identity, is not that they are culturally, ethnically,
linguistically or even physically &the same, but that they are seen and
treated as 'the same' (3.e. non-white, 'other') by the dominant culture. It
is their exclusion which provides what Laclau and M o d e call the
common 'axis of equivalence'of this new identity. However, despite the
fact that efforts are made to give this "black' identity a singIe ar unified
content, it continues to exist as an identity alongside a wide mnge of
. ' ofher djffe~nces.Afro-Caribbean and.Indianpeople continue to
maintain diflerent cultural traditions, 'Black' is thus an example, not
only of the political character of new identities -i.e. their positional
and conjunctural character (their formation in and far specEc .times and
places] -but also of the way identity and difference are inedcably
articulated or knitted together in differentidentities, the one never
wholly obliterating the other.
As a tentative konclusion it would appear then that globalization does
have the effectof contesting and dislocating the centred and 'dosed'
identities of a national culture. It^does have a pluralizing impact on
identities. producing a variety of possibilities and new positions of
idenmcation, and making identities more positiond, more political,
more plural and diverse;less fixed, un3ed or trans-historical.However,
its general impact remains contradictory. Some identities gravitate
towards what Robins calls 'Tradition', attempting to restore their former
purity and recover the unities and certainties which are felt as being
lost. Others accept that identity is subject to the play of history, politics,
representatinn and difference, so that they are unlikely ever again to be .
unitary or 'pure'; and these cansequently gauitate towards what Robins
[followingHomi Bhabha) cdls Translatien'.
Section 6 will now briefly sketch this contradictory movementbetween
Tradition and Translation on a wider, global canvas and ask what it tells
us about the way identities need to be conceptualized in relationt o
modernity's futures.
Asian cultural identities maintail iuropeancontext